


In the Air

by DoHK



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff, Gen, Meet-Cute, One Shot, Pre-Relationship, Sokka is a reporter, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, airplane flirting, suki is a pop star, zuko is an artist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:40:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27220612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoHK/pseuds/DoHK
Summary: Sokka is a reporter taking a long-needed vacation. He gets bumped up to first class and meets Suki, a member of the world-famous Kyoshi Warrior girl group. What's a man to do but talk?
Relationships: Sokka/Suki (Avatar)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	In the Air

**Author's Note:**

> (Everyone does self-insert once in a while; as a reporter suffering through a brutal few years, this is mine.)

“Sir? Sir? We would like to apologize. There was a minor problem with your booking and it appears the seat you had booked was, in fact, double-booked. Again, we would like to offer our sincerest apologies.”

Sokka sighed. Typical. He began mentally preparing for the battle of rebooking.

“However, because this is an issue on our end, we’re able to provide a complimentary seat in first-class, if that’s acceptable to you?” the woman behind the counter said, looking up with a bright, fake smile.

“I think that’s the most acceptable thing that’s happened all year. First class is fine, thank you,” Sokka said, looking up from the fake smile out to the green and bronze airship floating docked outside the window. He’d never been in first class before. And first class on a day and night trip? He’d struck gold. An irrepressible smile fought the gravity in the corners of his mouth. The busy hall was already stacked with passengers carrying boxes of whatever they deemed needed to travel halfway across the world from the new and shining metropolis of Republic City to the old and fashionable Caldera City. Instead of sleeping on a chair that leaned back too little, he’d be in a bed! His smile turned wry at the thought of the scratchy elegance that awaited me.

“You’ll be boarding in the very first group, sir. We would like to thank you for flying Republic Air,” the woman behind the counter said, her smile still big and still false.

“Thank you,” he replied, giving a small nod. Sokka walked back toward the crush, moving between people with practiced grace, his shoulders dipping and hips swiveling from years of experience working crowds and hunting down politicians at the front of meeting halls for quotes. He heard a commotion towards the front of the line but ignored it. He wanted to buy a few more snacks for the trip and an extra notebook. He was nearly out of paper in the one he had with him and hadn’t had time to buy a new one before this trip. Sokka found a store with fire flakes and saltwater taffy. He liked taffy. The guessing game of what flavor it would be when you unwrapped the candy was always fun to play. Unless you got palm-banana. He hated palm-banana. Palm-banana was the worst. He sighed as he looked at the journals. They all had horrible little phrases printed on the front about truth and light. Truth and light looked like mud, not frilly gold leaf. Sokka picked the least offensive one, something in blue and white with clouds or something on the front cover. Clouds were fine, he mused. And no dumb phrases. That was good. He paid for the snacks and the journal and walked back to the gate. The crowd was still abuzz about what had happened before, but he paid no notice as he reshouldered his bag and showed the woman at the gate his ticket.

“Oh, right this way, sir,” the woman in uniform said. Sokka thanked her and shouldered through the door behind her onto the airship’s walkway. He scoffed at the gold trimming around the posters on the wall. The posters all had exotic locales painted in bright colors with thick lines. He appreciated the art, even if the words on the poster weren’t any good. The entire walkway felt first class. Then again, it might just be normal. He’d never flown to Caldera City this way before. He was going to visit Zuko for two weeks. Work had been awful and his editor told him to leave before he burned out for good. So he made a call to Zuko and planned a couple of weeks doing tourist things. He appreciated Zuko offering a place to crash. And he appreciated the man already made plans for a concert. Even if he only stood in the back with his arms folded and nodded his head to the music. 

As he entered the airship he showed a stewardess at the door his upgraded ticket. The woman smiled at him with the same bright and fake smile as the last one. He smiled falsely back. She swept her arm toward the first class cabin and he stepped through. Brown leather and deep green cushions, with seats set in fours, two across from each other. The pods of seats were set in rows down the aisles, and he found his way to his seat in a pod of four in the middle of the plane by the wide bay windows. A woman was sitting kitty-corner to his assigned seat. Sokka took his bag off his shoulder and dropped it on his seat, giving a closed-mouth smile to the women and rummaging through the bag for a book. She was staring at the window and didn’t even bother looking at him. He gave a single nod to himself as he looked down at his bag again. The woman was very pretty. Short dyed pink hair, full lips, sharp cheekbones, wearing gold bangles on her wrist and a tattoo of an unagi swirling around her left arm.

Sokka sat down with a book in hand. He’d decided to bring a new author, an Earth Kingdom philosopher who wrote about balance. Or something like that. That’s what the back of the book said at least. He needed something that wasn’t news or news briefs or op-eds. So, philosophy seemed the way to go. He cracked the book to the first page. 

_ The way of balance is the same way of the Avatar…  _

“Oh for the love of —” Sokka muttered to himself. 

_ … but the way of balance is also the way of seeing and being seen. _

Already one line in and he felt lost. Seeing? Being seen? Weren’t facts just facts and vision just vision? Unless of course it was a politician saying what they were doing was actually not that thing. Then believing had everything to do with not seeing. Or seeing and not believing. He already felt his head spinning. A vacation was supposed to clear the head, not make it hurt. 

He decided to put the book down until he was in the air. To kill time he watched the stewardesses and stewards move in their set patterns around the cabin. They primped seats and moved bottles back and forth between what appeared to be the kitchen in the back of the cabin and what seemed to be a refrigerator at the front. Sokka enjoyed this kind of pattern pulling. He was good at it and could already pick out some of the social cues the airline workers gave each other. 

“Is this your first time on an airship?”

Sokka turned from his watching to the woman sitting in the corner of their four-seat square. She was looking at him with a raised eyebrow and a smirk. 

“No, no, just my first time in first class,” he said.

“Oh, you don’t say?”

“There was an issue with the booking. To be honest, I figured I was going to be stuck in Republic City for a while. Which would have been bad, cause this is the first vacation I’ve been on in forever,” Sokka said. He immediately wondered why he’d given up so much information about himself. The woman wouldn’t care. She was just making fun of him anyway.

“When was your last vacation?” she asked, her smirk disappearing into a look of genuine interest. Or faked genuine interest. He practiced that look in the mirror himself regularly to keep people talking. It was very good. It was professional.

“Three years ago? I wanna say three years? Time tends to blend together when you’re working as a reporter,” he answered. 

She nodded. Her hair swayed forward with the movement. 

“A reporter for who?”

“ _ The Republic City Gazette _ . I work as a political reporter. So I cover the city and then the major meetings of the Nations with the Avatar,” he said. He added the last part when he wanted to impress someone. He knew he shouldn’t try, but he wanted to impress the woman with the pink hair and the unagi tattoo. 

She smiled at that and raised her eyebrows fraction at the Avatar comment. Another perfect look of surprise. She would be a good interview if he was writing a story. Sokka appreciated it when people could respond as they should. It made it easy when it was obvious they both knew their roles. He liked easy. Easy was good and frictionless. There should be less friction in this world.

“I write a lot of stories about those kind of things that no one likes to read about but get mad about if they don’t get written. So I spend a lot of time talking to people who don’t want to talk to me. And fighting about what they said. And then fighting about what the fight was about. It’s a job,” he finished lamely.

The woman nodded again, smiling just a little. He really hoped she was not faking it. But if she was, it was a good fake. The fringe of her hair was almost white and the gold bangle moved in rhythm with her forearm as she put her chin on her hand. She had green eyes.

“Do you like being a reporter?” she asked.

He thought for a second. A stewardess passed by his seat and he watched her pressed uniform pass. All of the stewardesses had little hats pinned to the left side of their head at a jaunty angle. He wondered how many pins were lost on airships each year. Probably a lot, but not a statistically significant amount. Sokka realized he had ignored the woman for longer than he’d intended.

“Sorry, drifted off there. No, I don’t. It’s a terrible job that has everyone hate you or pretend they’re your friend to avoid you writing about them or to have you write about them in a positive light. Terrible hours, bad pay, you drink just to feel something half the time and drink to forget what you did feel the other half, and you tend to spend time with other reporters complaining about what you wrote about that day because reporters are the only other people that understand why reporting is such a terrible job in the first place. But you do it because who else is going to,” he said.

The woman nodded again. She had long lashes. 

“But you still do it?” she asked.

“I do, yeah,” he said. He then felt uncomfortable and realized he hadn’t asked her anything yet.

“I’m Sokka, by the way,” he said, and stuck out his hand so he was leaning across the armrests of the seats. The woman looked at his hand for a moment before extending her own, the bangles making a small jangling noise as she shook his hand firmly.

“Suki. It’s nice to meet you, Sokka,” she said, looking him in the eye. Again, he found himself wondering what was real about their interaction and conversation. 

“So Suki, what do you do for a living?” he asked.

“I’m a performer,” she said, tilting her head back and exposing her throat. She sighed and he noticed how the muscles and tendons moved in parallel lines. 

“I’m … a performer,’ she repeated. 

“Oh,” he said. Unbidden, his mind raced for what kind of performance as she seemed reticent to explain further. That hesitance was real, he was sure of it. 

“Why are you going to Caldera City?” he asked.

“I have a show. Why are you going to Caldera City?” she said.

“I needed to leave Republic City for a little while. I have a friend in Caldera City who I haven’t seen in ages who’s going to show me around. I think he has tickets for a Kyoshi Warriors concert too, but I wouldn’t know; I don’t listen to much music,” Sokka said.

The whitish fringe of her hair went into motion again. Before either could say anything else, the intercom crackled to life. 

“This is your captain speaking, we will be taking off momentarily and on our way to Republic City. Flight time is expected to be 16 hours with favorable tail winds. Dinner, breakfast and a late lunch will be served on this full-service flight. Stewardesses will be around to take your orders after we reach cruising altitude. Please enjoy your time on Republic Air,” a voice said from the speakers.

“I’d avoid the fish,” Suki said, catching Sokka’s eye and giving a little smirk again. He decided that was truthful advice. She was looking out the window again and he felt the airship shudder slightly as it turned toward the runway. He looked out the window too and saw the madness of the tarmac. Airships were moving like icebergs on the sea, slow but filled with an implacable kinetic motion of destruction. He saw men rushing back and forth on the tarmac, moving bags and hauling lines like sailors. It was all nautical and he imagined himself on a two-masted ship moving up and down in the waves. He could see the blue ocean going down into black and cold and felt the wind cut through an oilskin parka. The horizon tilted and swept across the sea like a psychic blade separating elements. The ship’s sails snapped and caught in the wind. They bellied out with a perfect curve, the stitching straining under the pressure. His stance widened as he leaned against the railing, capturing his weight as the ship pitched. 

“Sir? Sir?” 

Sokka snapped out of his reverie. He saw the pins in the hat and the fake smile. Did they teach them how to smile? Was there a whole class about smiling that had to be taken before anyone could put on the pressed skirt and blazer? There probably was. It probably took at least a week to properly teach someone to smile like that. 

“What would you like for this evening’s meal?” the stewardess asked.

“Anything but fish?” he said, realizing he was uncertain what those other options were.

The stewardess smiled and thanked him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Suki looking out the window and shaking her head. She looked back and raised an eyebrow at him.

“‘Anything but the fish?’ Really taking a leap of faith there on me, huh?” she said.

Sokka shrugged. 

“I’m just happy to be here.”

Suki nodded. 

“Well, make sure to get champagne if they’re paying for it. It tastes better up high. More bubbly,” she said, raising her eyebrows as she said  _ bubbly _ .

He decided that was truthful too. As he looked down at his vegetarian entree served on airline china, he appreciated the fizzing of the wine in a cut-glass champagne flute. He didn’t expect that when the stewardess had poured the wine out of a green bottle the glass would be as heavy as it was. The china was also glass, something else unexpected. He could tell Suki was laughing at him as he was learning all of these things but he didn’t care. It was new and it made him effervescent for the first time in a long time. The champagne did taste good. Sokka ate quickly and then felt hungry still. He sighed and opened his bag. The fire flakes and saltwater taffy were still there. He sighed. As he turned back to his plate, he saw it was gone, but his champagne flute was refilled. 

Suki was looking at him again, her eyes flicking from his eyes to his wine. 

“Is this usual?” he asked.

“Bubbly, but dangerous,” Suki responded, winking.

“So don’t stop drinking then?” he responded, wondering if the wink was real.

She laughed at that. That might be real, he thought, but the champagne was already making him heady. It could be fake. He hoped it wasn’t. He decided it was time to pull the fire flakes and saltwater taffy out. Maybe he could figure out which flavor paired best with the champagne coming out of the green bottles. Taffy first, as a post-dinner aperitif. The packaging crackled as he opened the bag. He then leaned across the armrest again and offered Suki first pick of the taffy. She looked at the bag, then at him, and then selected a wax-paper wrapped candy. 

“I hate palm-banana, so if you like those I think we’ll be alright,” Sokka said. 

Suki laughed again. 

“Lucky for you, I do like palm-banana and can’t stand dragonfruit, which I’m going to take a guess and say is your favorite flavor,” she said.

The champagne was making him a little light-headed. He wondered how she knew dragonfruit was his favorite flavor. He wondered if dragonfruit was, in fact, his favorite flavor. It was close to the top, but was it the favorite of all saltwater taffy flavors? It was so much easier to have a least favorite. Before he knew it, he had moved to the seat directly across from Suki with champagne in hand. Suki looked at him with both eyebrows raised and crossed her legs. 

“Well, seemed easier over here,” Sokka said. 

“Mmmhmm,” she said, reaching to take another taffy. 

***

They talked about a lot of things. Sokka didn’t remember much of it when he relayed his tripall to Zuko at his apartment in Republic City. He did know when a fake smiling stewardess shook him awake, the light was strong and he smelled the humid tropical air of Caldera City. And the woman with pink hair was gone. And he had a hangover that made his head feel like it was splitting in half. And his mouth was cotton. As he struggled from his seat, he felt like a rusted ironing board being folded out for the first time in years. He gathered his things, realizing all the taffies had been eaten but their wax paper was folded up and placed with care back in the baggie. Head muzzy, he walked out onto the tarmac and cursed both the heat and the green bottled champagne. When he got into the terminal, he collapsed onto one of the chairs scattered around the atrium. The air was cooled in here and he felt some of himself come back to life. He also felt a crackling in his shirt pocket. He reached in and picked out a piece of paper with writing on it. He squinted at it and realized he needed a very large coffee, now. 

When he buzzed Zuko’s apartment, his friend’s voice came through the speaker in the same guarded cadence he used when unsure of new people.

“Hello?”

“Zuko. I need you to let me in. Then coffee. Then soup. Then at least a gallon of cold water. Then a shower,” Sokka said, his head leaning against the building’s dark gray exterior so his voice was muffled.

Zuko gave a short, sharp laugh.

“Did you drink on the airship? You’re not supposed to do that! It makes your hangover, like, ten times worse than normal!” he said, buzzing Sokka’s corpse inside. 

The two hugged when Sokka finally reached Zuko’s 13th floor apartment. The elevator was broken, and on the way up Sokka darkly thought about karmic retribution for first class seating. He’d sit in coach the rest of his life. 

“How was the flight?” Zuko asked, as Sokka flopped onto a futon facing the center of the city.

“You know, this is a really nice apartment,” Sokka said, collapsing into a horizontal L. “And it was long. Although I think I slept for most of it. I had a lot of champagne. And I talked with a pretty woman? She had pink hair. It was nice. Oh, I got bumped to first class. That was good.”

Zuko, the heels of his hands bearing his weight on his kitchen counter, looked at Sokka with suspicion.

“So, you got bumped to first class, drank too much bubbling wine, talked with a pretty woman —” 

“Who had pink hair—” Sokka said from the futon, a finger sticking up straight in the air.

“ — who had pink hair, and then slept for the rest of the flight?” Zuko finished. “Are you sure you didn’t just imagine her? Like you did when you got high on mushrooms with me and Aang and fell in love with the moon?”

“Hey! The moon is a very nice lady!” Sokka said. “Her hair was pink. Her name was Suki. And she left me this note, thank you very much.” 

The note was pinched between his index and middle finger. Zuko strode over and plucked it away from Sokka, then sighed.

“People keep doing that to me, and I don’t know why,” Sokka said, looking up at Zuko from his supine position. 

“Yeah, if you met you, you’d know why,” Zuko said. “So, her name was Suki?”

“Yes.”

“And she had pink hair?”

“Yes.”

“And she was flying to Caldera City?”

“She said she was a performer,” Sokka volunteered.

Zuko sighed from a place deep in his soul.

“Have you ever heard of the Kyoshi Warriors?”

“No. Do they fight? Or are they like … a political thing?” Sokka asked, his hand finally flopping on the couch. 

Zuko sighed, louder this time. 

“They’re literally the most famous pop group in the world, Sokka. Like, insanely famous. As in, so famous  _ I literally cannot believe you do not know who they are, Sokka, _ ” Zuko finished, his voice loud as he looked down at his friend who was now sound asleep on the couch.

“For Agni’s sake,” Zuko muttered, grabbing Sokka’s legs and putting them onto the futon. He grabbed a blanket and put it over his friend, who was now sleeping the sleep of the dead or the drunk. Zuko left the note on the table and went back to his studio. As he continued working on a commissioned piece in the old, traditional Fire Nation style he’d be paid handsomely for, he considered the level of stupidity in a man who had trained himself to see through all feints, fakes and falsities to get to the whole of the thing. Truly, Zuko mused, reporters were a special breed. 

***

When Sokka woke up he saw the note on the coffee table. He picked it up and read it again in the warmth of a good nap.

_ Sokka, _

_ I haven’t enjoyed a flight as much as this one in, ever, possibly. I liked talking to you. If you do come to the show in Caldera City, there will be a pass left for you.  _

_ I might be a warrior, but I’m a girl, too. _

_ Suki _

Sokka, still fuzzy, started to put something together. About fame, about seeing. About walking right next to a precipice and feeling the breeze threatening to push you off the edge. And then he realized it all.

“Oh, noooooooooooooooooo,” he moaned.

“Up there, bud?” Zuko chirped from another room in the apartment, over the sound of a Kyoshi Warriors song he was playing on his stereo. 

“Oh, nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.”

“Yeah, he’s up,” Zuko said to himself. He put down his pen and stopped working on the landscape.

Sokka was holding the note like it was a sacred writ handed down from a high mountain. He was still moaning quietly as he stared at it, his hand pushing his hair up from his forehead and his eyes wide open in terror. 

“Zuko? Did I … oh, noooooooo,” Sokka said, descending back into shock.

“That’s rough, buddy,” Zuko said, looking down at Sokka and shaking his head in mock disappointment. 

Sokka’s head was in his hands. 

“Anyway, concert is in like, six hours, so take a shower and make yourself presentable,” Zuko said, slapping Sokka on the back.

“Concert??” Sokka asked, the terror rising in his voice.

“Oh yeah, bud, we’re going to the Kyoshi Warriors concert tonight and you, my friend, have a date with a Kyoshi Warrior,” Zuko said, smiling as he prepared to make coffee for Sokka. “Shower and clean up.”

***

Sokka stayed in the shower so long Zuko was beginning to wonder if he was trying to drown himself. He finally came out, dressed and subdued. Zuko pushed him a cup of coffee and the reporter took it in his hands like it was the last cup he’d ever have. He drank it in silence and then threw his head back and let out a deep sigh. Zuko knew when to be quiet around Sokka. He’d talk when he was ready. And he’d get more out of him too. Zuko puttered around the kitchen, putting the tickets on the counter by Sokka to make sure he saw them. His friend was bad with women. Good at talking to them, bad at romancing them. And while he thought this might be funny, he also knew Sokka was circling around his internal drain faster and faster.

“So, you gonna see her?” Zuko asked. 

Sokka gave a deep shrug. 

“Are you … not gonna see her?” Zuko asked.

Sokka gave another deep shrug.

“So … what’s the plan here, bud?”

Sokka sighed.

“Same as always, huh? Just kind of, like, not reach out to a woman who has shown interest in you and then, like, think about it forever?” Zuko said, tweaking Sokka a little.

“I mean, well, yeah,” Sokka said, his head still thrown back. 

Hopeless, Zuko thought, absolutely hopeless. 

***

The inside of the concert hall was already packed and the bass was thumping. Sokka was out of his element. He preferred quieter places, or at least ones that didn’t have an ungodly number of people screaming or dancing or shouting. Zuko was at home in a place like this. He liked these kinds of wildnesses. It fit the artistic temperament. But for Sokka, it just made hearing people hard and that drove him insane. It turned into shouting and then more shouting. The strobing lights and darkness were already too much. Zuko had met some friends and told Sokka he’d find him in the back. Sokka pushed through the crowd to find a spot where he could see the stage, but not be deafened by the music. As he found his spot, leaning against a pillar, the stage went dark and then lights snapped on to spotlight five women in green dresses with their heads down. Then the music began. Sokka just watched, mesmerized, by the synchronous sweeping of limbs and hips. As he watched, he thought he could feel Suki’s eyes searching for him in the crowd. He was feeling uncomfortable in his gut. His body felt overheated and he began edging away from the crowd. He moved through the crowd like a fish swimming against a silver school that burst away from a shark. Sokka felt the world shift underneath him until he found his way to the cooler halls outside the venue where stragglers and vendors circulated slowly. The hall was walled in glass that faced the city, and he pressed his forehead against it to cool him down. His shadow closed the glare off and showed him the city lights below and away. They shined and blinked in tighter, more tangled patterns here than they did in Republic City which had been built by a renowned designer of the new school. Here, the people had built and rebuilt in the spaces available or the ones original to the caldera, with animal paths turning into thoroughfares and straight lines existing only on cadastrals in the city archives. Sokka saw it all unfold before him through time and through space. Buildings rose and fell and the great flame of Agni burned still and bright over it all as the sun spun through the sky and the creations of humanity bloomed and collapsed like flowers. He closed his eyes before it all became too much, and breathed deep to slow his heart. 

The bass pumped through the walls. Sokka kept breathing slow and deep to keep his heart from thumping out of his chest. He found he kept matching the beat of the songs as he drew breath. He kept having to start over. After a while, an intermission quieted the bass and a flood of people pressed into the glass-walled halls. Sokka heard Zuko shouting his name faintly at first and then louder. He turned away from the wall and saw his friend waving at him. 

“Too loud?” Zuko asked, pushing up close to Sokka. 

“Partly. I think I’m still a little hungover from last night. I’m feeling woozy,” Sokka said. 

“Woozy is probably the right word for what you are there, bud. Now, come on, follow me,” Zuko said. 

“Oh for …,” Sokka muttered, but followed Zuko down the thronged hallway. They passed through most of the coliseum’s concourse before they ended up somewhere before the bowels of it. A velvet rope with a very large man in a black suit ended their journey. Zuko clapped his friend on the shoulder.

“There you go,” he said.

“There I go what?” Sokka asked.

Zuko sighed again.

“This is the entrance to backstage, bud. Suki said she left you a pass, and I’ll be burned by Agni himself before I let you pass up an opportunity like that,” Zuko said, turning Sokka and putting his face right up next to his. “Do. Not. Over. Think. This.”

Sokka looked at the very large man, then at Zuko, then at the very large man again. 

“What’s to be overthought?” he asked.


End file.
